July 23, 2006

Clooney Tunes

Back in March, just before he won the Oscar for it, I published this article on George Clooney's take on the global oil business, Syriana, in the Sunday Times. The film is now out on DVD. It's very entertaining, but not at all securely founded in the facts, as Sacha Kumaria and I argued.

In a sense Gaghan and Clooney are correct — everything is connected.
The international energy markets, the war on terror, the spread of
democracy and liberalism in the Middle East are all complex, interwoven
issues, and no film can fully represent their interplay. But the film’s
creators misconceive the true nature of corruption.

In the Middle East it is borne of dictatorship and it is
political. With free markets in oil shut down in favour of grasping
state monopolies, corruption is inevitable, facilitated by the
secretive middlemen operating outside the regulations that govern
American and European companies.

Neither, as the example of Osama Bin Laden and the well-
educated middle-class pilots who led the 9/11 hijackings should show,
does poverty directly drive terrorism. On the contrary, judging from
Clooney’s example, if you want to drive a man to become a radical
opponent of his government, just give him millions of dollars and a
house in the Hollywood hills.

The term Syriana is most commonly used to describe the "Pax Syriana", the domination of Lebanon by Syria after the end of the country's civil war. I'm proud that, as far as we know, Sacha and I were the only people to publish a review of Syriana in Syriana.